News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

The Cultural Studies Program’s colloquium (CSC) series features talks by distinguished scholars from across the disciplines. Graduate student Dave Zeglen interviewed Daniel Zamora, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago. See below for the transcript.

Let us begin with your primary thesis, which has already stirred controversies and debates: How did Foucault understand neoliberalism, and how did he actually position himself vis-à-vis the shifting political currents of the 1970s? How was his thinking shifting on questions related to the social democratic welfare state? What factors contributed to Foucault’s open anti-socialism and anti-statism in the French context?

These are probably some of the most important questions to ask in order to understand Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism. And we can’t understand that relationship without placing Foucault’s work within the French context of the mid-1970s. More specifically, Foucault’s work is situated in the conflict between old and new lefts, in the post-1968 left’s increasing opposition to the post-war left.